SHELBY STEELE
Malcolm X
When asked recently what he thought of Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall is reported to
have said, "All he did was talk." And yet there is a kind of talk that constitutes action, a
catalytic speech that changes things as irrevocably as do events or great movements. Malcolm
X was an event, and his talk transformed American culture as surely, if not as thoroughly, as
the civil rights movement, which might not have found the moderation necessary for its
success had Malcolm not planted in the American consciousness so uncompromised a vision
of the underdog's rage.
Malcolm staked out this territory against his great contemporary and foil, Martin Luther
King, Jr. Sneering at King's turn-the-other-cheek Christianity, he told blacks, "Don't ask God
to have mercy on him [the white man]; ask God to judge him. Ask God to do onto him what
he did onto you. Ask God that he suffer as you suffered." To use the old Christian categories,
Malcolm was the Old Testament to King's New Testament. Against the moral nobility of the
civil rights movement, he wanted whites to know that he was not different from them; that he,
too, would kill or die for freedom. "The price of freedom is death," he often said.
Like all true revolutionaries, Malcolm had an intimate relationship with his own death. By
being less afraid of it than other men, he took on power. And this was not so much a death
wish as it was the refusal of a compromised life. These seemed to be his terms, and for many
blacks like myself who came of age during his era, there was nothing to do but love him,
since he, foolishly or not, seemed to love us more than we loved ourselves.
It is always context that makes a revolutionary figure like Malcolm X a hero or a destroyer.
Even when he first emerged in the late fifties and early sixties, the real debate was not so
much about him (he was clear enough) as about whether or not the context of black
oppression was severe enough to justify him. And now that Malcolm has explosively
reemerged on the American scene, those old questions about context are with us once again.
Spike Lee has brought Malcolm's autobiography to the screen in one 5 of the most
thoroughly hyped films in American history. Malcolm's life is available in airport bookstalls.
Compact discs and videotapes of his "blue-eyed devil" speeches can be picked up at Tower
Records. His "X" is ubiquitous to the point of gracing automobile air fresheners.
Twenty-seven years after his death, in sum, he is more visible to Americans than he was
during his life. Of course Americans will commercialize anything; but that is a slightly
redundant point. The really pressing matter is what this says about the context of race
relations in America today. How can a new generation of blacks--after pervasive civil rights
legislation, Great Society programs, school busing, open housing, and more than two decades
of affirmative action--be drawn to a figure of such seething racial alienation?
The life of Malcolm X touched so many human archetypes that his story itself seems to
supersede any racial context, which is to say that it meshes with virtually every context.
Malcolm X is a story. And so he meets people, particularly young people, in a deeply
personal way. To assess whether or not he is a good story for these times, I think we have to
consider first the nature of his appeal.
Let me say--without, I hope, too many violins--that when I was growing up in the 1950s, I
was very often the victim of old-fashioned racism and discrimination. These experiences were
very much like the literal experience of being burned. Not only did they hurt, they also
caused me to doubt myself in some fundamental way. There was shame in these experiences
as well, the suspicion that by some measure of human worth I deserved them. This, of course,
is precisely what they were designed to make me feel. So right away there was an odd
necessity to fight and to struggle for both personal and racial dignity.
Those were the experiences that enabled me to hear Malcolm. The very soul of his legend
was the heroic struggle that he was waging against racial doubt and shame. After a tortuous
childhood and an early life of crime that left him shattered, he reconstructed himself--against
the injuries of racial oppression--by embracing an ideology of black nationalism. Black
nationalism offered something very important to Malcolm, and this quickly became his
magnificently articulated offering to other blacks. What it offered was a perfectly cathartic
distribution of love and hate. Blacks were innocent victims, whites were evil oppressors, and
blacks had to distribute their love and hate accordingly. But if one focuses on the called-for
hatred of whites, the point of Malcolm's redistribution of emotion will be missed. If Malcolm
was screaming his hatred of whites, his deeper purpose was to grant blacks a license to give
themselves what they needed most: self-love.
This license to love and to hate in a way that soothed my unconscious doubts was nothing
less than compelling by the time I reached college. Late at night in the dorm, my black
friends and I would turn off the lights for effect and listen to his album of speeches, The
Ballot or the Bullet, over and over again. He couldn't have all that anger and all that hate
unless he really loved black people, and, therefore, us. And so he massaged the injured part of
ourselves with an utterly self-gratifying and unconditional love.
With Martin Luther King, by contrast, there were conditions. King asked blacks--despised
and unloved--to spread their meager stock of love to all people, even to those who despised
us. What a lot to ask, and of a victim. With King, we were once again in second place, loving
others before ourselves. But Malcolm told us to love ourselves first and to project all of our
hurt into a hatred of the "blue-eyed devil" who had hurt us in the first place.
In Malcolm's deployment of love and hate there was an intrinsic logic of dignity that was
very different from King's. For King, racial dignity was established by enlarging the self into
a love of others. For Malcolm, dignity came from constriction, from shrinking to the enemy's
size, and showing him not that you could be higher than he was, but that you could go as
low. If King rose up, Malcolm dropped down. And here is where he used the hatred side of
his formula to lay down his two essential principles of black dignity: the dehumanization of
the white man and the threat of violence.
What made those principles essential to the dignity of blacks for Malcolm was that they
followed a tit-for-tat logic--the logic by which, in his mind, any collective established its
dignity against another collective. And both these principles could be powerfully articulated
by Malcolm because they were precisely the same principles by which whites had oppressed
blacks for centuries. Malcolm dehumanized whites by playing back, in whiteface, the
stereotypes that blacks had endured. He made them animals--if they like their meat rare,
"that's the dog in 'em." In the iconography of his Black Muslim period, whites were heathen,
violent, drooling beasts who lynched and raped. But he often let his humor get the best of
him in this, and most blacks took it with a grain of salt.
What made Malcolm one of the most controversial Americans of this century was the
second principle in his logic of dignity: the threat of violence. "If we have a funeral in
Harlem, make sure they have one downtown, too." "If he puts his hand on you, send him to
the cemetery." Tit-for-tat logic taken to its logical conclusion. In fact, Malcolm's focus on
violence against whites was essentially rhetorical. Like today's black street gangs, his Black
Muslims were far more likely to kill each other than go after whites. Yet no one has ever
played the white hysteria over black violence better than Malcolm.
He played this card very effectively to achieve two things. The first was to breach the
horrible invisibility that blacks have endured in America. White racism has always been
sustained by the white refusal or reluctance to see blacks, to think about them as people, to
grant them the kind of place in the imagination that one would grant, say, to the English or
even the Russians. Blacks might be servile or troublesome, but never worthy of serious,
competitive consideration. Against this Malcolm sent a concrete message: We are human
enough to want to kill you for what you have done to us. How does it feel to have people
you have never paid much attention to want to kill you? (This was the terror Richard Wright
captured so powerfully in Native Son: Your humble chauffeur may kill your daughter. And
that novel, too, got attention.) Violence was a means to black visibility for Malcolm, and later
for many other militants.
Today this idea of violence as black visibility means that part of 15 Malcolm's renewed
popularity comes from his power as an attention getting figure. If today's "X" is an assertion
of self-love, it is also a demand to be seen. This points to the second purpose of Malcolm's
violent rhetoric: to restore dignity to blacks in an almost Hegelian sense. Those unwilling to
kill and to die for dignity would forever be a slave class. Here he used whites as the model.
They would go to war to meet any threat, even when it was far removed. Many times he told
his black audiences that whites would not respect them unless they used "any means
necessary" to seize freedom. For a minority outnumbered ten to one, this was not rational. But
it was a point that needed to be made in the name of dignity. It was something that many
blacks needed to feel about themselves, that there was a line that no one could cross.
Yet this logic of dignity only partly explains Malcolm's return as an icon in our own day. I
believe that the larger reason for his perdurability and popularity is one that is almost never
mentioned: that Malcolm X was a deeply conservative man. In times when the collective
identity is besieged and confused, groups usually turn to their conservatives, not to their
liberals; to their extreme partisans, not to their open-minded representatives. The last
twenty-five years have seen huge class and cultural differences open up in black America.
The current bromide is that we are not a monolith, and this is profoundly true. We now have
a black governor and a black woman senator and millions of black college graduates and so
on, but also hundreds of thousands of young blacks in prison. Black identity no longer has a
centrifugal force in a racial sense. And in the accompanying confusion we look to the most
conservative identity figure.
Malcolm was conservative through and through. As a black nationalist, he was a hard-line
militarist who believed in the principle of self mastery through force. His language and
thinking in this regard were oddly in line with Henry Kissinger's description of the world as a
brutal place in which safety and a balance of power is maintained through realpolitik. He was
Reaganesque in his insistence on negotiating with whites from a position of strength--meaning
the threat of violence. And his commitment (until the last year of his life) to racial purity and
separatism would have made him the natural ally of David Duke.
In his personal life, moreover, Malcolm scrupulously followed all the Islamic strictures
against alcohol, tobacco, drugs, fornication, and adultery, and his attitude toward women was
decidedly patriarchal: As a Black Muslim minister he counseled that women could never be
completely trusted because of their vanity, and he forbade dancing in his mosque. In his
speeches he reserved a special contempt for white liberals and he once praised Barry
Goldwater as a racial realist. Believing entirely in black self-help, he had no use for
government programs to uplift blacks, and sneered at the 1964 Civil Rights Bill as nothing
more than white expedience.
Malcolm X was one of the most unabashed and unqualified conservatives of his time. And
yet today he is forgiven his sexism by black feminists, his political conservatism by black and
white liberals, his Islamic faith by black Christians, his violent rhetoric by nonviolent veterans
of the civil rights struggle, his anti-Semitism by blacks and whites who are repulsed by it, his
separatism by blacks who live integrated lives, and even the apparent fabrication of events in
his childhood by those who would bring his story to the screen. Malcolm enjoys one of the
best Teflon coatings of all time.
I think one of the reasons for this is that he was such an extreme 20 conservative, that is,
such an extreme partisan of his group. All we really ask of such people is that they love the
group more than anything else, even themselves. If this is evident, all else is secondary. In
fact, we demand conservatism from such people, because it is a testament of their love.
Malcolm sneered at govemment programs because he believed so much in black people: They
could do it on their own. He gave up all his vices to intensify his love. He was a father figure
who distributed love and hate in our favor. Reagan did something like this when he called the
Soviet Union an "evil empire," and he, too, was rewarded with Teflon.
The point is that all groups take their extreme partisans more figuratively than literally.
Their offer of unconditional love bribes us into loving them back rather unconditionally, so
that our will to be literal with them weakens. We will not see other important black leaders of
the 1960s--James Farmer, Whitney Young, Andrew Young, Medgar Evers (a genuine martyr),
Roy Wilkins, John Lewis--gracing the Tshirts of young blacks who are today benefiting more
from their efforts than from Malcolm's. They were too literal, too much of the actual world,
for iconography, for the needs of an unsure psyche. But Malcolm, the hater and the lover, the
father figure of romantic blackness, is the perfect icon.
It helps, too, that he is dead, and therefore unable to be literal in our own time. We can't
know, for example, if he would now be supporting affirmative action as the reparation that is
due to blacks, or condemning it as more white patronization and black dependency. In a way,
the revival of Malcolm X is one of the best arguments I know of for the validity of the
deconstructionist view of things: Malcolm is now a text. Today we read Malcolm. And this--
dare I say--is one quality he shares with Christ, who also died young and became a text. He
was also an Odyssean figure who journeyed toward self-knowledge. He was a priest and a
heretic. For many whites he was a devil and for many blacks a martyr. Even those of my
generation who grew up with him really came to know him through the autobiography that he
wrote with Alex Haley. Even in his time, then, he was a text, and it is reasonable to wonder
if he would have the prominence he has today without that book.
How will the new epic movie of his life--yet another refracting text--add to his
prominence? Clearly it will add rather than subtract. It is a film that enhances the legend, that
tries to solidify Malcolm's standing as a symbol of identity. To this end, the film marches
uncritically through the well-known episodes of the life. It is beautifully shot and superbly
acted by a cast that seemed especially inspired by the significance of the project. And yet it is
still, finally, a march. Spike Lee, normally filled with bravado, works here like a TV
docudramatist with a big budget, for whom loyalty to a received version of events is more
important than msight, irony, or vision. Bruce Perry's recent study of Malcolm's life,
Malcolm: A Lfe of the Man Who Changed Black America, which contradicts much of the
autobiography, is completely and indefensibly ignored.
Against Lee's portrayal of Malcolm's father as a stalwart Garveyite killed by the Klan,
Perry reveals a man with a reputation for skirt-chasing who moved from job to job and was
often violent with his children. Lee shows the Klan burning down Malcolm's childhood home,
while Perry offers considerable evidence to indicate that Malcolm's father likely burned it
down himself after he received an eviction notice. Lee offers a dramatic scene of the Klan
running Earl Little and his family out of Nebraska, yet Malcolm's mother told Perry that the
event never happened. The rather heroic cast that Malcolm (and Lee) gave to his childhood is
contradicted by Perry's extensive interviews with childhood friends, who portray Malcolm as
rather fearful and erratic. Lee's only response to Perry's work was simply, "I don't believe it."
It was Spike Lee's unthinking loyalty to the going racial orthodoxy, 25 I believe, that led
him to miss more than he saw, and to produce a film that is finally part fact, part fiction, and
entirely middlebrow. That racial orthodoxy is a problem for many black artists working today,
since its goal is to make the individual artist responsible for the collective political vision.
This orthodoxy arbitrates the artist's standing within the group: The artist can be as individual
as he or she likes as long as the group view of things is upheld. The problem here for black
artists is that their racial identity will be held hostage to the practice of their art. The effect of
this is to pressure the work of art, no matter what inspired it, into a gesture of identification
that reunites the artist and the group.
In this sense Lee's Malcolm X might be called a reunion film, or a gesture of identification
on his part toward the group. Thus his loyalist unquestioning march through Malcolm's
mythology. It is certainly ironic, given the debate over whether a white man could direct this
film that Spike Lee sees his hero as only a black man with no more than black motivations.
Human motivations like doubt, fear, insecurity, jealousy, and love, or human themes like the
search for the father, betrayal and tragedy, are present in the film because they were present
in Malcolm's story, but Lee seems unaware of them as the real stuff of his subject's life. The
film expresses its identification with much racial drama, but in a human monotone.
Thus many of the obvious ironies of Malcolm's life are left hanging. If black nationalism
resurrected Malcolm in prison, it also killed him in the end. This was a man who put all his
faith in the concept of a black nation, in the idea that blackness, in itself, carried moral
significance, and yet it was black nationalist fingers pulling the triggers that killed him. Even
on its surface this glaring irony points to the futility of cultish racial ideologies, to the
collective insecurities that inspire them, and to the frightened personalities that adhere to them
as single-mindedly as Malcolm did. But doesn't this irony also underscore the much more
common human experience of falling when we grip our illusions too tightly, when we need
them too much? It should not embarrass Lee to draw out the irony of Malcolm being killed
by blacks. He was. And there is a lesson in it for everyone, since we are all hurt by our
illusions. To make his gesture of identification, however, Lee prefers to sacrifice the deeper
identification that his entire audience might have with his subject.
He also fails to perform the biographer's critical function. Clearly Malcolm had something
of the true believer's compulsion to believe blindly and singularly, to eradicate all complexity
as hypocrisy. All his life he seemed to have no solid intemal compass of his own to rely on
in the place of ideology--which is not to say that he didn't have brilliance once centered by a
faith. But in this important way he was very unlike King, who, lacking Malcolm's wounds,
was so well centered that he projected serenity and composure even as storms raged around
him. Out of some underlying agitation Malcolm searched for authorities, for systems of belief,
for father figures, for revelations: West Indian Archie, Elijah Muhammad, the Black Muslim
faith, Pan Africanism, and finally the humanism of traditional Islam. All this in thirty-nine
years! What else might have followed? How many more fathers? How many more isms?
Moreover, once Malcolm learned from these people, faiths, and ideologies--or had taken
what he could from them--he betrayed them all, one after another. There was always this
pattern of complete, truebelieving submission to authority and then,the abrupt betrayal of it.
There was something a little narcissistic in this, as though his submissions were really setups
for the victories that he would later seize. And with each betrayal-victory there was something
of a gloat--his visit to West Indian Archie when he was broken, his telling Mike Wallace on
national television about Elijah Muhammad's infidelities. Betrayal was triumph for Malcolm, a
moving beyond some smallness, some corruption, some realm that was beneath him.
The corruption at the heart of Malcolm's legend is that he looked 30 bigger than life
because he always lived in small, cultish worlds, and always stood next to small people. He
screamed at whites, but he had no idea of how to work with them to get things done. King
was the man who had to get things done. I don't think that it is farfetched to suggest that
finally Malcolm was afraid of white people. While King stared down every white from Bull
Connor to the Kennedys, Malcolm made a big deal out of facing offwith Elijah Muhammad,
whom he had likely propped up for the purpose. His proclivity for little people who made
him look big suggests that his black nationalism covered his fear of hard, ordinary work in
the American crucible. Up against larger realities and bigger people, he might have felt
inadequate.
Lee's film, as beautifully executed as it is, refuses to ask questions about Malcolm's legend.
A quick look behind the legend, however, shows that Malcolm's real story was, in truth,
tragedy. And the understanding of this grim truth would have helped the film better achieve
the racial protest it is obviously after. Malcolm was hurt badly by oppression early in his
childhood. If his family was not shattered in the way he claimed, it was shattered
nevertheless. And this shattering had much to do with America's brutal racial history. He was,
in his pain, a product of America. But his compensations for the hurt only extended the hurt.
And the tragedy was the life that this extraordinary man felt that he needed to live, that
Malcolm Little had to become Malcolm X, had to be a criminal, then a racial ideologue, and
finally a martyr for an indefinable cause. Black nationalism is a tragedy of white racism, and
can sometimes be as ruinous as the racism itself.
And so it is saddening to witness the reemergence of this hyped-up, legendary Mr. X, this
seller of wolf tickets and excuses not to engage American society. This Malcolm is back to
conceal rather than to reveal. He is here to hide our fears as he once hid his own, to keep us
separated from any helpful illumination. Had the real Malcolm, the tragic Malcolm, returned,
however, it would have represented a remarkable racial advancement. That Malcolm might
have given both blacks and whites a way to comprehend our racial past and present. In him
we all could have seen the damage done, the frustrations borne, and the fruitless heroism of
the American insistence on race.